Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Proposing a new interpretation of literature and mass culture in nineteenth-century Europe, this work focuses on works by Marx, Balzac, Dickens, Adorno and Benjamin. It explores in them a complex ‘mimetic’ disposition toward commodification in the realm of culture. The aim of the book is twofold: to explicate subtle and profoundly ambivalent attitudes toward the rapidly expanding mass culture of the 1830s in France and England, and to identify through this reading of the novelists a common ‘mimetic’ element that has eluded traditional dialectical approaches to culture. The book shows how the fascination with ‘mimesis’ can be traced to Marx’s critique of the commodity form in Capital. It discerns two attitudes toward cultural commodification at a very specific, and decisive, moment in history and examines their reappearance in the Marxian cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School a century later.